Softcover. Dekalb IL, Northern Illinois University Press, reprint, 2006, Book: Very Good, Dust Jacket: None, Softcover, 342 pages, b&w illustrations. Prostitutes, shoplifters, vagrants, murderesses -- Dodge tracks the history of such "improper" women as she explores the history of female incarceration in Illinois from 1835 to the present. In court and in prison, these women - some who are considered beyond all hope of reformation - have received vastly different treatment than their male counterparts. A woman's fate in court often hung on officials' estimates of her moral and sexual reputation. Alleged promiscuity, illegitimate births, venereal disease, interracial relationships, or use of alcohol could condemn her in the eyes of judge and jury. Ethnic and social prejudice played a role, too, as most incarcerated women poor, working-class, immigrants, or members of a racial minority. Highly readable yet theoretically sophisticated, Whores and Thieves of the Worst Kind provides a striking collective portrait of incarcerated women. Drawn from extensive primary sources, the voices of female prisoners emerge powerfully and poignantly as individuals tell their stories. Clean copy.
Hardcover. New York, Smithsonian Books, 1st, 2010, Book: Very Good, Dust Jacket: Very Good, 253 pages. Hardcover with dust jacket. Very clean, inside and out. Tight binding, sharp corners, illustrations in bw, a nice copy.
Hardcover. New York , The Citadel Press, 1st, 1968, Book: Very Good, Dust Jacket: Fair, Harcover, 167 pages, b&w frontispiece and plates. Edge wear, tears to dust jacket. Orange top edge decorative stain. A clean, tight copy.
Softcover. Berkeley, University of California Press, 1st pbk., 2006, Book: Very Good, Dust Jacket: None, Softcover, 373 pages, b&w illustrations. Clean, unmarked copy with only minor wear to wrappers. This engaging, deeply researched study provides the richest and most nuanced picture we have to date of cinema-both movies and movie-going-in the early 1910s. At the same time, it makes clear the profound relationship between early cinema and the construction of a national identity in this important transitional period in the United States. Richard Abel looks closely at sensational melodramas, including westerns (cowboy, cowboy-girl, and Indian pictures), Civil War films (especially girl-spy films), detective films, and animal pictures-all popular genres of the day that have received little critical attention. He simultaneously analyzes film distribution and exhibition practices in order to reconstruct a context for understanding moviegoing at a time when American cities were coming to grips with new groups of immigrants and women working outside the home. Drawing from a wealth of research in archive prints, the trade press, fan magazines, newspaper advertising, reviews, and syndicated columns-the latter of which highlight the importance of the emerging star system-Abel sheds new light on the history of the film industry, on working-class and immigrant culture at the turn of the century, and on the process of imaging a national community.
Hardcover. NY, Bantam, 1st, 2010, Book: Very Good, Dust Jacket: Very Good, Hardcover in a bright, unclipped dust jacket. 518 pages, b&w illustrations. Appetite for America is the incredible real-life story of Fred Harvey--told in depth for the first time ever--as well as the story of this country's expansion into the Wild West of Bat Masterson and Billy the Kid, of the great days of the railroad, of a time when a deal could still be made with a handshake and the United States was still uniting. As a young immigrant, Fred Harvey worked his way up from dishwasher to household name: He was Ray Kroc before McDonald's, J. Willard Marriott before Marriott Hotels, Howard Schultz before Starbucks. His eating houses and hotels along the Atchison, Topeka, and Santa Fe railroad (including historic lodges still in use at the Grand Canyon) were patronized by princes, presidents, and countless ordinary travelers looking for the best cup of coffee in the country. Harvey's staff of carefully screened single young women--the celebrated Harvey Girls--were the country's first female workforce and became genuine Americana, even inspiring an MGM musical starring Judy Garland. Clean copy.
Hardcover. New York, Morrow, 1st, 1992, Book: Very Good, Dust Jacket: Very Good, Hardcover, 160 pages. Illustrated in full color. Still in shrink wrap. Beautifully illustrated with 68 full color reproductions, several double page spreads and two foldouts. Impressive paintings of cowboys, Indians, buffalo, cavalry, mountain men, immigrant wagons, spectacular rock formations and vistas, etc. McCarthy was a successful book cover and movie poster illustrator before becoming one of our finest Western artists.
Hardcover. Baltimore, Johns Hopkins University Press, 1st, 2008, Book: Very Good, Dust Jacket: Very Good, Hardcover in a bright dust jacket, 307 pages with index. Having studied over 3,000 surviving alley houses in Baltimore through extensive land records and census research, Mary Ellen Hayward systematically reconstructs the lives, households, and neighborhoods that once thrived on the city's narrowest streets. In the past, these neighborhoods were sometimes referred to as "dilapidated," "blighted," or "poverty stricken." In Baltimore's Alley Houses, Hayward reveals the rich cultural and ethnic traditions that formed the African-American and immigrant Irish, German, Bohemian, and Polish communities that made their homes on the city's alley streets. Featuring more than one hundred historic images, Baltimore's Alley Houses documents the changing architectural styles of low-income housing over two centuries and reveals the complex lives of its residents. Clean copy.
Hardcover. New York , Quantuck Lane, 1st, 2005, Book: Very Good, Dust Jacket: Very Good, Hardcover, 176 pages, color photographs. Like new in publisher's shrink-wrap. The North Fork is the roughly sixty-mile-long spit of New York's Long Island that runs from Riverhead to Orient Point. With the fairly well protected Long Island Sound on the North and Peconic Bay on the South, it was a logical place for some of the earliest English immigrants to settle and build barns. It is still home to more working farms than any other part of the island. And from the timber-frame barns of the British farmers of the seventeenth century to the pole barns of the twentieth, the variety is stunning. In a survey sponsored by the Old House Society in Cutchogue, Mary Ann Spencer spent the last few years making a comprehensive inventory and photographing more than six hundred barns on the North Fork. Two hundred of them are still in use, although their fate is by no means certain. Here in their glory (and sometimes less than that) are the most interesting barns,which reveal, among other things, their functional development, their often haphazard fenestration, their soft patina of age, and their fit in the landscape. Spencer's complete survey forms a second part of this book, which provokes feelings of nostalgia and raises our fears for the future of these wonderful structures. More than 150 color photographs.
Softcover. NY, Delta/Dell, 1st, 1994, Book: Very Good, Dust Jacket: None, Softcover, 275 pages. In his look at the role baseball plays in the lives of American men, the author recounts his own role as shortstop and discusses Bobby Thompson's home run, the 1969 Mets, and other events. By making baseball the focal point of his evocative memoir, the fifty-something Mayer can lay claim to spiritual kinship with all American males who ever aspired to major-league stardom and settled for the sidelines. Looking back on the pre-TV days when he roamed N.Y.C.'s rough diamonds as a scrawny shortstop, the author recalls the pleasures and pains of rooting for the Brooklyn Dodgers, an aberrant choice for a Bronx- born lad whose immigrant parents lived within walking distance of Yankee Stadium. Mayer's loyalty to the team did not survive the franchise's flight to Los Angeles; as a young newspaperman, however, he found it possible to transfer his allegiance to the Mets. Clean copy.
Hardcover. NY, Viking Press., 1st, 1982, Book: Very Good, Dust Jacket: Very Good, Hardcover in a bright, unclipped dust jacket. The classic, unforgettable memoir of a young girl's coming of age, Bronx Primitive recalls the vitality of an immigrant neighborhood through the unsentimental eyes of a child. With an unerring eye for detail and an iridescent, clear-eyed prose, Kate Simon captures the particular world of her childhood as well as the universal uncertainties and triumphs of a young girl on the threshold of womanhood.
Softcover. Ithaca NY, Cornell University Press, 2nd pr., 1993, Book: Very Good, Dust Jacket: None, Softcover, 280 pages. Since 1965, West Indians have been emigrating to the United States in record numbers, and to New York City in particular. Caribbean New York shows how the new immigration is reshaping American race relations and sheds much-needed light on factors that underlie some of the city's explosive racial confrontations. Philip Kasinitz examines how two forces-racial solidarity and ethnic distinctiveness-have helped to shape the identity of New York's West Indian community. He compares "new" (post-1965) immigrants with West Indians who arrived earlier in the century, and looks in detail at the economic, political, and cultural rules that Afro-Caribbean immigrants have played in the city during each period.
Hardcover. Madison WI, University of Wisconsin Press, 1st, 2010, Book: Very Good, Dust Jacket: Very Good, Hardcover in a bright dust jacket, 203 pages. INSCRIBED BY AUTHOR on title page. Catina's Haircut: A Novel in Stories spans four generations of a peasant family in the brutal poverty of post-Unification southern Italy and in an immigrant's United States. The women in these tales dare to cross boundaries by discovering magical leaps inherent in the landscape, in themselves, and in the stories they tell and retell of family tragedy at a time of political unrest. Clean copy.
Hardcover. Philadephia, Temple University Press, 1st, 1992, Book: Very Good, Dust Jacket: Very Good, Hardcover in a bright dust jacket, 275 pages. Min Zhou examines how an ethnic enclave works to direct its members into American society, while at the same time shielding them from it. Focusing specifically on New York's Chinatown, a community established more than a century ago, Zhou offers a thorough and modern treatment of the enclave as a socioeconomic system, distinct form, but intrinsically linked with, the larger society. Zhou's central theme is that Chinatown does not keep immigrant Chinese from assimilating into mainstream society, but instead provides an alternative means of incorporation into society that does not conflict with cultural distinctiveness. Concentrating on the past two decades, Zhou maintains that community networks and social capital are important resources for reaching socioeconomic goals and social positions in the United States; in Chinatown, ethnic employers use family ties and ethnic resources to advance socially. Relying on her family's networks in New York's Chinatown and her fluency in both Cantonese and Mandarin, the author, who was born in the People's Republic of China, makes extensive use of personal interviews to present a rich picture of the daily work life in the community. Clean copy.
Hardcover. New York , Norton , 1st, 1999, Book: Very Good, Dust Jacket: Very Good, Hardcover in a bright dust jacket. 190 pages, illustrated in color and b&w. Cipe Pineles was art director for leading fashion magazines between 1930 and 1960. Tracing Pineles's career from young immigrant to "ranking" female in the design world, Martha Scotford chronicles a time when few women were involved in design and assesses Cipe's brilliant contributions to graphic design and magazine design in particular.
Hardcover. Scalo/DAP, 1st, 1995, Book: Very Good, Dust Jacket: Very Good, Hardcover, 159 pages. Color portraits of a community of immigrants living in Meyrin, a Swiss enclave near Geneva.
Hardcover. NY, Fordham University Press, 1st, 1997, Book: Very Good, Dust Jacket: Very Good, Hardcover in a bright dust jacket. 280 pages. The Ninth Massachusetts Infantry, which saw duty with the Army of the Potomac, was composed primarily of Irish immigrants and their descendants who hailed from Boston. One officer, Patrick R. Guiney, eventually rose to command the regiment as a colonel prior to suffering a service-ending wound in 1864. He left a full record of his men's activities in his letters to his wife, Jeannette; the letters also reveal that Guiney's political views, which leaned toward Lincoln and the Republicans, were not shared by most of his fellow officers or men. Editor Samito has provided a rather detailed prolog and annotation for the letters, which tell us as much about Guiney as a husband as they do about matters at the front. Among the numerous collections of Civil War letters that appear in print, these are distinguished for the author's forthright discussion of political and military affairs. Clean copy.
Hardcover. Berkeley CA, University of California Press, 1st, 2012, Book: Very Good, Dust Jacket: Very Good, Hardcover, 267 pages, b&w photos. Clean, unmarked copy with only minor wear to dust jacket. This book examines the often-neglected role played by immigrant artists and critics in the circle of Alfred Stieglitz, including Japanese-German author Sadakichi Hartmann, Mexican-born caricaturist Marius de Zayas and English Sri-Lankan curator Ananda Coomaraswamy, as well as better-known U.S.-born painters, including Arthur Dove and Georgia O'Keeffe.
Softcover. Chapel Hill NC, University of North Carolina Press, 1st, 1998, Book: Very Good, Dust Jacket: None, Softcover, 235 pages, b&w illustrations. Focusing on the porkpacking industry in Iowa, Fink investigates the experience of the rural working class and highlights its significance in shaping the state's economic, political, and social contours. Fink draws both on interviews and on her own firsthand experience working on the production floor of a pork-processing plant. She weaves a fascinating account of the meatpacking industry's history in Iowa--a history, she notes, that has been experienced differently by male and female, immigrant and native-born, white and black workers. Like new.
Hardcover. New York, Lovell, Coryell & Company, 1st, 1895, Book: Very Good, Dust Jacket: None, Hardcover, terra-cotta cloth stamped in black and gilt. Cover shows some light wear but otherwise internally clean. Black & white illustrations by E.W. Kemble. An early American novel featuring Italian immigrants in New York by a respected journalist who was familiar with the people there. Clean copy.
Hardcover. NY, Scribner, 1st, 2003, Book: Very Good, Dust Jacket: Very Good, Hardcover in a bright, unclipped dust jacket. McKinty's second novel is a brutal tale of revenge starring a young illegal immigrant from Ireland who chooses a criminal career in New York over unemployment in Belfast. Arriving in the city in the early 1990s, the antihero Michael Forsythe lands a spot as an enforcer for Irish mobster Darkey White. Though Forsythe at first keeps his hands relatively clean, he soon racks up a significant number of kills in skirmishes with rival crews as well as with Dominican gangs warring for control of the streets. An affair with his boss's girlfriend leads to a setup: he and his mates are trapped in a drug sting in Mexico and abandoned in a remote prison. "If someone grows up in the civil war of Belfast in the seventies and eighties, perhaps violence is his only form of meaningful expression," McKinty writes early in the novel, and the bulk of the story recounts Forsythe's grisly efforts to escape and avenge himself, including a stint with a Dominican group seeking to oust Darkey White. The pace is brisk and energetic, but Forsythe remains a cipher-a self-educated intellectual who listens to Tolstoy on tape during a stakeout but exhibits puzzlingly little interest in finding an alternative to the gun and the knife. Clean copy.
Hardcover. New Haven CT, Yale University Press, 1st, 2019, Book: Very Good, Dust Jacket: None, Hardcover, pictorial boards, 232 pages. The question "What is American art?" might conjure the hyperrealism of Raphaelle Peale and William Harnett, the bold graphic style of Stuart Davis and Jacob Lawrence, or the Precisionist forms of Charles Sheeler. Little known, however, is that such notions of American art are significantly owed to a Russian Jewish immigrant named Edith Halpert. The founder of the Downtown Gallery in New York, Halpert shaped an identity for American art, declaring that its thrilling heterogeneity and democratic values were what most distinguished it from the European avant-garde. For forty-plus years, Halpert's gallery brought recognition and market success to now-legendary American artists--among them Arthur Dove, Marsden Hartley, and Georgia O'Keeffe, in addition to the artists mentioned above. She relentlessly championed nonwhite, female, and unknown artists and was a formative advisor in the shaping of many of the nation's most celebrated art museums and collections, from San Francisco to Boston. Not content with those achievements, she also pioneered the appreciation and collecting of American folk art. Richly illustrated with works that passed through her groundbreaking gallery, this book tells the extraordinary and largely overlooked story of her career and legacy. The artists Halpert launched into the American canon are household names--and this book compellingly argues that hers should be, as well. In publisher's shrinkwrap.
Hardcover. NY, Prestel, 1st, 2015, Book: Very Good, Dust Jacket: None, Hardcover, 192 pages, color and b&w images. This first volume in a major new series of illustrated biographies of Magnum photographers traces the life and achievements of Eve Arnold, who captured an incredible array of subjects with remarkable clarity and compassion. Eve Arnold (1912-2012) was born to a poor immigrant family in Philadelphia and became a photographer by chance. In 1950 Arnold was a 38-year-old Long Island housewife when she enrolled in a six-week photography course that led to her groundbreaking photo essay on black fashion models in Harlem. She went on to become the first woman to join Magnum Photos and, eventually, one of the most accomplished photojournalists of her time. Filled with reproductions of Arnold's acclaimed photographs, shot in both color and black and white, as well as previously unseen archival images, this biography relates Arnold's bold images to the fascinating story of their making. Renowned for her intimate portraits of figures such as Marilyn Monroe, Malcolm X, and Queen Elizabeth, Arnold was equally comfortable documenting the lives of the poor and dispossessed. "I don't see anybody as either ordinary or extraordinary. I see them simply as people in front of my lens." To her images of migrant workers, disabled veterans, and protesters for civil rights in the US and against apartheid in South Africa, she brought an unflinching eye and a strong sense of social justice. This highly engrossing narrative tells a compelling story of an intrepid artist whose life's purpose was to report on the lives of others.
Hardcover. NY, Harcourt, reprint, 2000, Book: Very Good, Dust Jacket: Very Good, Hardcover in a bright dust jacket. SIGNED BY KURTZ on the title page with the admonishment to "Tell your stories!" Gorgeous color illustrations by E.B. Lewis. As her father prepares for a trip back to his childhood home in Ethiopia, Desta begins to worry. Where does her father truly belong-in the village of his youth or here in America with her? What was growing up in Ethiopia like? And will her father's love for his family be enough to bridge these two worlds and bring him back to her? A powerful portrait of a contemporary American immigrant family from a Coretta Scott King Honor-winning artist portrays a heartwarming father-daughter relationship. Clean copy.
Hardcover. Princeton NJ, Princeton Architectural Press, 1st, 2001, Book: Very Good, Dust Jacket: Very Good, 326 pages, illustrated with b&w photographs, several color plates and architectural drawings by Vitale. Foreword by Horace Havemeyer III. Ferruccio Vitale is America's forgotten landscape architect. Though his works like Skylands and Longwood Gardens are well known, his name has been eclipsed by his contemporary, Frederick Law Olmsted, Jr. Yet Vitale's influence on the modern direction of landscape design and his promotion of it as a profession is arguably more significant than Olmsted's. His unique designs and philosophy, which challenged the then-dominant pictorial mode of landscape architecture, influenced generations of followers, and is still felt today. Vitale (1875-1933) developed his rationale designs, based on the principles of composition from the fine arts and architecture, in both civic commissions and, most notably, at the country estates of captains of industry and finance. He introduced an idealized and abstracted type of formal design that created beautiful spaces, structured large sites, and reflected informal and relaxed plant compositions. Ferruccio Vitale tours over 40 of his masterworks, photographed by some of the best landscape photographers of the time, including Samuel Gottscho. It recounts the compelling story of a life in the early twentieth century, influenced by immigrant dreams, social clubs, and professional connections, and its culmination in some of the greatest landscapes of the 20th century.